Eco Soundings

PR company Luther Pendragon has been hired by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), a publicly-funded body investigating the disposal of UK nuclear waste, to help it get its message across. Fair enough, but the company seems to have an inflated idea of what it can charge the taxpayer. An email exchange obtained by the NuclearSpin website shows that the firm tried to charge CoRWM £200 an hour to process a Freedom of Information request about CoRWM's activities. Luther said it would take seven hours, so the total bill would be £1,400. "Ridiculously expensive," riposted a Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesman. Under government guidelines, civil servants working on FOI requests "cost" £25 an hour.

In deep water

The International Whaling Commission will soon meet in St Kitts, where Japan is expected to secure a majority vote and prepare the way for commercial whaling after 20 years. An international panel of "independent legal experts" has found that Japanese "scientific whaling" is unlawful under international law, and contravenes key international conventions. Meanwhile, Japan's whaling authority has released a report showing how much fish whales eat. It is being used by the Japanese government to persuade small countries such as Tuvalu to vote for more whaling. Captain Paul Watson, of Sea Shepherd, who is at permanent war with the whalers, is not impressed: "You have been bought by Japan, lock, stock and barrel," he tells Tuvaluans. "You have become a nation of whores."

Pushing the boat out

The Castle Mill boatyard in Oxford has been cleared by British Waterways of pesky boats and protestors and is secure behind razorwire and 10-ft high walls. But at what cost to the taxpayer? One estimate, supplied by a reliable source, suggests about £250,000 - not far short of the cost of finding and equiping a roughly equivalent yard for boatowners.

A little goes a little way

To celebrate World Environment Day, which was on Monday, the World Bank announced that it is becoming "carbon neutral" in its Washington DC offices and that from now on the costs of staff travel and its big annual shindigs will be covered by bank contributions to renewable energy projects. "The World Bank Group is committed to walking the talk on corporate social responsibility," says its president, Paul Wolfowitz. "This is a small but symbolic contribution." It's not just small, it's spectacularly crass, considering that only 10% of the billions of dollars of public money the bank spends every year on financing energy projects goes to renewable energy or energy efficiency.

Empty counsel

England's football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has been urging fans to recycle the many extra millions of beer cans and bottles they are bound to empty during the World Cup. Perhaps he could also ask the Department of Trade and Industry to introduce the waste electrical and electronic equipment directive, which might prevent so many TVs being recycled on rubbish dumps in Nigeria, India and China.